It is not the least wonderful part of the whole surprising story that they should have made this conquest so completely and so easily. We must attribute it to the superiority of their ships in comparison with those of the Arabs and other Moslems in that sea, to their better armament and to their greater skill in using these ships for naval battle. Had the Mahommedans of that ocean possessed anything like the ships and the experience of marine warfare that sailors of the same religion in the Mediterranean had acquired by perpetual sea-fighting, it is not possible that Portugal could have dominated them so decisively and at such slight cost to herself. Besides that the Portuguese could manœuvre far more skilfully with their ships, and knew how to combine them for attack, the guns which their ships carried seem to have been far more powerful than any that the Moslems had, whether ashore or afloat; for not only do we find them gaining the victory in all the naval battles, but they employed their ships' guns in bombarding the ports and combining the bombardment from the sea with attacks by their landing forces. The result of it all was that within a dozen or so years of da Gama's reaching India the Portuguese were the masters of those seas, and had the whole of that trade in their hands. And while Portugal thus {9} worked her way to the dominance of the eastern sea, Spain was confirming the conquests for which Columbus had pointed her the way in the West. [Sidenote: Atlantis] For some years there had been vague rumours in Europe of an island far out in the western sea, and a still more confident idea that if men could sail westward far enough they would come to the eastern side of Asia. That was the goal at which they aimed, in the westward sailing. Columbus' special genius and courage inspired him to go bravely on this western cruise, not troubling himself, as others had done before him, with the search for that fabulous island, of Atlantis, supposed to be somewhere in the mid-ocean, but holding his way continuously towards the sunset until he did at length touch a land which he thought to be that eastern Asia which he had set out to look for.